Heath Hutcheson, Campus Carrier sports editor
In the fall, Berry appointed Doug Elly as their new head coach for both the men’s and women’s tennis teams, beginning his work on Aug. 1 of last year. He replaced previous coach Clay Hightower, who retired after 30 years of service.
“I’ve been here at Berry for six months now,” Elly said. “I was in Kansas City before, which is quite a distance, and it’s always a huge adjustment when you need to travel. It’s not like just coming from Atlanta.”
Elly had previously coached at William Jewell College, a D-II school. Elly’s 2023 season had some of the best results that the school had ever seen, with the men’s program qualifying for postseason play and even reaching the Great Lakes Valley Conference quarterfinal round. Under the final two seasons with Elly, the women’s program had 17 wins, and the 2022 season also saw their highest win total since 2015.
While the change in location has proven to be a hurdle, the brand new environment has been a huge shift as well for Elly.
“I think the main difference when it comes to Berry is that I don’t have that support group like I used to, but I’m developing one here,” Elly said. “I’ve just recently been getting into senior golf and I’ve even got poker night tonight with some of the seniors over at The Spires.”
A member of the men’s tennis team, senior Carsten Balao has been playing since he was a freshman, so he has gotten to watch firsthand how the tennis team has evolved throughout the years. He spoke on how things have changed for the team with Coach Elly at the helm.
“The practices are a lot more well constructed now, and they have a lot of purpose behind them,” Balao said. “We have weight training and cardio stuff before practices as well. The coach really listens to us very well when we have questions or we need a different time to practice, just things like that.”
Overall, Balao considers Elly’s appointment to be an improvement over how things were before, with communication between the team members and coaches having been greatly benefited.
“Before, the coach wouldn’t listen to us as well sometimes,” Balao said. “We would voice that we didn’t want to do morning practices and we would still have them, but now we have more nighttime practices from 8-10p.m. I just think this new coach has a genuine interest in making the team better.”
Spring practices began on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Elly has been honing in on improving all the skills that the team had previously been developing in the fall.
“In the fall we focus on developing skills, and in the spring we aim to figure out how to use those skills to compete and win,” Elly said. “Mondays and Tuesdays are more focused on drills and studying the shots that we’re learning. Wednesdays and Thursdays are more focused on match play and studying film to see what we’re doing on the court during match play.”
Coach Elly has thoroughly enjoyed all the work he’s gotten to do at Berry so far, and generally does not consider the coaching aspect to be too much different from what he had already been doing at William Jewell College, with only the people and environment having changed.
“The work here has been fantastic,” Elly said. “The players are committed to their school and to being better tennis players.”
The team has their first match of the spring on Saturday, against Shorter. With team morale at such a high point, everybody hopes that the match proves a solid start to the season.
“I think the team is ready for this match,” Elly said. “They’re all very excited and they had a great fall, and I think they did really well with their training too. In the fall we didn’t get much match play in though, so this will be the true test to see how we’re doing with our conference and our region.”